ce reached its conclusion separately, since each had a
different problem in the efficient use of manpower and each had its
own racial traditions. Accordingly, the services saw little need to
exchange views, develop rivalries, or imitate one another's racial
policies. There were two exceptions to this situation: both the Army
and Air Force naturally considered the Navy's integration experience
when they were formulating postwar policies, and the Navy and Air
Force fought the Army's proposals to experiment with integrated units
and institute a parity of enlistment standards.

_Equal Treatment and Opportunity_

Segregation officially ended in the active armed forces with the
announcement of the Secretary of Defense in 1954 that the last
all-black unit had been disbanded. In the little more than six years
after President Truman's order, some quarter of a million blacks had
been intermingled with whites in the nation's military units
worldwide. These changes ushered in a brief era of good feeling during
which the services and the civil rights advocates tended to overlook
some forms of discrimination that persisted within the services. This
tendency became even stronger in the early 1960's when the
discrimination suffered by black servicemen in local communities
dramatized the relative effectiveness of the equal treatment and
opportunity policies on military installations. In July 1963, in the
wake of another presidential investigation of racial equality (p. 620)
in the armed forces, Secretary of Defense McNamara outlined a new
racial policy. An extension of the forces that had produced the
abolition of segregated military units, the new policy also vowed to
carry the crusade for equal treatment and opportunity for black
servicemen outside the military compound into the civilian community
beyond. McNamara's 1963 directive became the model for subsequent
racial orders in the Defense Department.

This enlargement of the department's concept of equal treatment and
opportunity paralleled the rise of the modern civil rights movement,
which was reaching its apogee in the mid-1960's. McNamara later
acknowledged the influence of the civil rights activists on his
department during this period. But the department's racial progress
cannot be explained solely as a reaction to the pressures exerted by
the civil rights movement. Several other factors lay behind the new
and broader policy. The Defense Department was, for instance,